Velcroman1 writes: Forget the mile-high club. Who's joined the 21-mile high club? NASA has always been tight lipped on the subject of sex in space — which makes people all the more curious. How would it work? Has anyone done it before? Can a child be conceived in zero-G? With few animal tests and (virtually no human testing), there’s been next to no scientific analysis of the issue. Until now.

The Journal of Cosmology has published a special issue detailing the mission to Mars, which touches all the bases. In a chapter titled “Sex on Mars,” Dr. Rhawn Joseph from the Brain Research Laboratory in California discusses everything from the social conditions that would push astronauts to have sex to the possibility of the first child being born on another planet. Such an infant would be the first real Martian — at least by nationality, the researcher pointed out. “On Mars, the light’s going to be different, the gravity will be different, it’s a completely different atmosphere,” he said. “So if you put an infant on Mars, they would adapt to varying degrees of the new environment. And after several generations, you’d have a new species,” he said.